Don't like 70% of American households have cable? (or equivalent)
I'd think that over a hundred million samples would be quite a bit better than a few thousand, no matter how well-chosen those few thousand are. As for privacy concerns, I'd specifically choose a cable company that tracked what shows I watch, since it'd mean that shows I like wouldn't get canceled because by some fluke, a few thousand people chosen for their willingness to keep a diary of their viewing habits, happened to not like it (or maybe just didn't notice it was available). They'd get canceled because I really am the only one actually watching.
They're putting it through so they can satisfy laws in places like Massachusetts which require (or are going to require, maybe?) open standards for government documents. If they sneak in a not-really-open standard as an open one, the letter of the law in such states would be satisfied by going with Microsoft, and other bidding laws then take over. "Fair" bidding laws which Microsoft can manipulate for favorable results.
"It's not really an open standard" is going to be a pretty poor legal position if they've got the ISO stamp of approval.
The entire list of votes should be published in multiple locations. Then, you can go to any of these locations and verify that your vote is correctly recorded. Copy holders, which could be anyone who can afford the print cost since the data is anonymized, would be able to compare their copies of the lists to make sure that they did, in fact, receive identical copies.
Everyone need not check their vote from multiple copies, but the copies should be ubiquitous enough that they have plenty of opportunity to if they choose.
Copy holders would then be able to run the tallying software (or tallying software of their own design. The format of the database should be an open standard) and compare that to the official tally.
That confirms that the lists are the same lists, and that the checked entries are correct, but as pointed out in another reply, it fails to confirm that unchecked votes are real. If many people check their entries, there would be a high probability that real unchecked votes are also unmodified, but no guarantee that fake votes (which the faker would know had zero chance of being checked) are not present in the system. An upper bound on fraudulent votes can be determined by keeping lists of checked votes. The total number cannot exceed the number of unchecked votes.
Every vote is assigned to an ID. Not your ID, but a relatively random numerical one. When the voting is done, the entire votes database is made available on DVD (or whatever medium is appropriate to storing 300 million records. I wouldn't expect much space at all, I'd bet the IDs take up more space than the actual data.
Then independent organizations can tally the votes themselves and verify that the election was on the up and up. They can also allow people to check their votes in the database to verify individually that the database itself is correct. Assuming the database has been distributed in whole to all of the various organizations, mis-votes should be easy enough to discover.
Then it only remains that you need to protect people's anonymity. A ticket that can be used to verify an individual vote on behalf of a person can also be used to verify that vote to the satisfaction of a vote-buying machine (or worse.)
A solution is to obscure the information by giving each voter not one, but a list of ID numbers and told which one is theirs privately. That way, nefarious organizations wouldn't be able reliably say they've been given the correct number, which should kill their scheme. It's not a perfect solution, though, and I can already see flaws in it, but that just means it needs a bit more work before it's ready for prime time.
Say what now? The test is like ten dollars, and they dropped the code requirement for all classes. The only other barrier to entry is that you have to buy or build a radio. (which ironically is actually quite a bit easier if you're building a CW rig...)
Heat is very bad for sperm, which is why they're kept in a sack, outside your body. Even a little bit of heat is enough to reduce your count, but it should be a temporary depression. Remove the heating and a couple of days later you should be back up to full strength. I don't think anyone could bear to stand in the same spot long enough to permanently sterilize themselves, though.
There is only one metric for measuring something's utility to society. And that metric is profit.
Obviously, the potential users need to have decent information in order to act rationally, and in the case of things like a military, it's difficult to gain that information because the benefits are long-term: even countries with weak militaries don't just keep getting invaded all the time, but by being invaded you run the very real risk of not being able to determine how much you spend for someone else's military.
But pay-phones are not like that. People act pretty rationally about pay-phones, and that is why they don't tend to make money for the phone company. If you want a phone company to keep them around for civic use (i.e. emergency calls) then you should pay them for it. Municipalities could pay for a civil communications system (much like the various safety call-boxes on college campuses), either using existing phones or a dedicated emergency call-box system. Or you could charge for emergency calls. But they'd probably have to be more expensive than regular calls owing to their infrequency compared to pre-cell phone total phone usage, and the need to maintain the entire network off the profits.
A company whose revenues are below it's cost of operation goes out of business. A division that does the same thing costs its parent company money, and obviously cannot be spun off into a separate company.
A company that uses toxic materials to increase its profits over safety concerns is immoral. A company that decides to get out of an area for which there are not enough customers to sustain it? That's just good business, and that's good for everybody all around. It's how the economy relaxes toward its most efficient configuration. It's also how evolution works, but slashdot is full of anti-science fundies, so I can understand why such cynicism would appear here.
The brilliance of the enviro-collectivists is that they can't possibly get *all* of their measures approved, but they can probably get some of them. So, in 50 years, or 100 (though few around now will be around in 100..) when things are not nearly as dire as the scaremongering predictions deemed, they can point to the staggering array of freedom-reducing half-measures as the only reason it wasn't much, much worse, and so we should implement new, stronger measures, shouldn't we?
Obviously, you're not the type to get fussy about cables strewn all over your desk. Also, you probably don't switch mouse side frequently for variety, or you would see that the idea of a wireless keyboard is a good one: You can type on top of the desk, on your lap, under the desk, switch mouse side frequently, and move the keyboard out of the way for when you need the desk for something to do with actual paper.
You can do all of those things with a wired keyboard, but you've got to deal with twisting up the cable or your mouse will be useless. And depending on how you run the cable, you can't do all of those things at the same time. If you're fussy about the cable, you won't do those things very often at all, since anywhere but the default position tends to look messy.
So how's that repetitive stress injury workin' out for you?
2.) The Human Genome Project to sequence *ONE* complete set of DNA for a single human took us 13 years and 3 billion dollars. That's comparable to the Apollo project, to sequence *ONE* example of a complex being's DNA.
That was the publicly funded project. And they would've taken even longer if the privately funded Celera hadn't gotten involved by threatening to finish a lot faster and less expensively.
I imagine that if it were possible, the reintroduction effort wouldn't be a one-shot all-or-nothing thing like you propose. Step one would be characterizing a complete set of DNA (non-nuclear DNA), to get an idea of what the cells of the final product would look like. Step two would be identification of genes which are present in existing animals, and a database search for a few candidate species similar enough to transform into the interesting species. Then there are a continuum of steps over several generations as you replace/add a little bit of the dino-dna to the candidate species until you end up with something that's close enough to implant the "pure" cells.
But, you're right, that every one of those steps is incredibly unlikely and currently impossible. And you'd have to find and reproduce all the symbiotic organisms as well, or at least find compatible modern analogues. I don't think anyone's worried about Jurassic Park, though. Jurassic Burger on the other hand sounds especially intriguing.
It's not you. They appear to have decided that yellow on beige is a good combo for headline text. For good measure, at the bottom of the page, there are some nice big blue arrows for advancing to some kind of following page or something. But they appear to have been lifted from a website with a white background.
I always wondered why the DVD format isn't just a lossy compressed giant 3D matrix of RGB triplets. Motion would correspond to a volume in 3-space, and you could get whatever framerate you wanted just by slicing the rectangular tube to arbitrarily thin slices.
The trick is to define your compression algorithm so that frames don't just fade into each other, but objects define regions. Like the pimentos in an olive loaf.
No, it'd make sense for them to recommend multicast as a distribution method. If you actually own the infrastructure, there's nothing bittorrent can do that multicast can't do better.
I sincerely doubt that you can buy Zunes through the Apple site. Obviously there, the Zune's numbers will look poor. Similarly at Microsoft's site, Zune sales outstrip iPod sales by a factor of billion to zero.
Only if you've never had an iPod and therefore avoided the iTunes Music Store. The Zune does not, afaik, play apple-drm'd music. If you're replacing an iPod, and you did use the music store, then the Zune is not as useful to you. Though I'm not sure this is actually an argument in favor of purchasing an additional iPod...
Plugging into google, 3lbs is about 40 cubic feet of air (at STP), which is ~half of a typical recreational SCUBA bottle. An out-of-shape open circuit diver can go through that much air in about 40 minutes at the surface.
There's enough oxygen present for maybe 3x that time. So depending on how they're replenishing gases, they're losing between 40 minutes and 2 hours of breathing gas a day, and depleting their diluent supply.
I wouldn't expect a few days of a leak like that to cause a pressure drop. Once the diluent (and/or stored oxygen) is depleted, then I'd expect to see the slow pressure drop.
The phrase isn't misused. In the absence of the rhetorical term called "begging the question," the words in the phrase "begs the question" are, in fact, equivalent to "raises [or asks for] the question."
It really has dual meaning: the meaning of the words themselves and the historical usage of the phrase in rhetorical circles.
Consider also, the phrase, "You're a dick." It could mean that the speaker is implying you're a member of the fraternity of people named, "Richard." It could also be a slang figure of speech calling you out as a pedantic jackass who wants to pretend s/he's superior to people by declaring one common use of a phrase as inferior to another common use of that phrase.
If you want a decent glass of soda, why would you buy it in a restaurant that serves drinks?
Sometimes, you just want something that mostly resembles what you're really interested in, and has other advantages, like is available in the place you are now, rather than someplace else.
That said, I don't drink McDonald's coffee, but I can't imagine it being substantially worse than Starbucks' fare, and that place bases it's entire business on bad coffee.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't like 70% of American households have cable? (or equivalent)
I'd think that over a hundred million samples would be quite a bit better than a few thousand, no matter how well-chosen those few thousand are. As for privacy concerns, I'd specifically choose a cable company that tracked what shows I watch, since it'd mean that shows I like wouldn't get canceled because by some fluke, a few thousand people chosen for their willingness to keep a diary of their viewing habits, happened to not like it (or maybe just didn't notice it was available). They'd get canceled because I really am the only one actually watching.
They're putting it through so they can satisfy laws in places like Massachusetts which require (or are going to require, maybe?) open standards for government documents. If they sneak in a not-really-open standard as an open one, the letter of the law in such states would be satisfied by going with Microsoft, and other bidding laws then take over. "Fair" bidding laws which Microsoft can manipulate for favorable results.
"It's not really an open standard" is going to be a pretty poor legal position if they've got the ISO stamp of approval.
The entire list of votes should be published in multiple locations. Then, you can go to any of these locations and verify that your vote is correctly recorded. Copy holders, which could be anyone who can afford the print cost since the data is anonymized, would be able to compare their copies of the lists to make sure that they did, in fact, receive identical copies.
Everyone need not check their vote from multiple copies, but the copies should be ubiquitous enough that they have plenty of opportunity to if they choose.
Copy holders would then be able to run the tallying software (or tallying software of their own design. The format of the database should be an open standard) and compare that to the official tally.
That confirms that the lists are the same lists, and that the checked entries are correct, but as pointed out in another reply, it fails to confirm that unchecked votes are real. If many people check their entries, there would be a high probability that real unchecked votes are also unmodified, but no guarantee that fake votes (which the faker would know had zero chance of being checked) are not present in the system. An upper bound on fraudulent votes can be determined by keeping lists of checked votes. The total number cannot exceed the number of unchecked votes.
If you're holding the lasgun, the guy with the shield doesn't have the option of assuming you won't go through with it.
In a world of slow-moving shield-fighters, the man with the lasgun is king.
Every vote is assigned to an ID. Not your ID, but a relatively random numerical one. When the voting is done, the entire votes database is made available on DVD (or whatever medium is appropriate to storing 300 million records. I wouldn't expect much space at all, I'd bet the IDs take up more space than the actual data.
Then independent organizations can tally the votes themselves and verify that the election was on the up and up. They can also allow people to check their votes in the database to verify individually that the database itself is correct. Assuming the database has been distributed in whole to all of the various organizations, mis-votes should be easy enough to discover.
Then it only remains that you need to protect people's anonymity. A ticket that can be used to verify an individual vote on behalf of a person can also be used to verify that vote to the satisfaction of a vote-buying machine (or worse.)
A solution is to obscure the information by giving each voter not one, but a list of ID numbers and told which one is theirs privately. That way, nefarious organizations wouldn't be able reliably say they've been given the correct number, which should kill their scheme. It's not a perfect solution, though, and I can already see flaws in it, but that just means it needs a bit more work before it's ready for prime time.
How exactly would you do that permissions thing in XP? I mean, not every installer is content to run as an unprivileged-user.
Say what now? The test is like ten dollars, and they dropped the code requirement for all classes. The only other barrier to entry is that you have to buy or build a radio. (which ironically is actually quite a bit easier if you're building a CW rig...)
Heat is very bad for sperm, which is why they're kept in a sack, outside your body. Even a little bit of heat is enough to reduce your count, but it should be a temporary depression. Remove the heating and a couple of days later you should be back up to full strength. I don't think anyone could bear to stand in the same spot long enough to permanently sterilize themselves, though.
Your boss, where was his mobile the majority of the time? clipped to his belt? If so, why didn't he get a tumor there?
There is only one metric for measuring something's utility to society. And that metric is profit.
Obviously, the potential users need to have decent information in order to act rationally, and in the case of things like a military, it's difficult to gain that information because the benefits are long-term: even countries with weak militaries don't just keep getting invaded all the time, but by being invaded you run the very real risk of not being able to determine how much you spend for someone else's military.
But pay-phones are not like that. People act pretty rationally about pay-phones, and that is why they don't tend to make money for the phone company. If you want a phone company to keep them around for civic use (i.e. emergency calls) then you should pay them for it. Municipalities could pay for a civil communications system (much like the various safety call-boxes on college campuses), either using existing phones or a dedicated emergency call-box system. Or you could charge for emergency calls. But they'd probably have to be more expensive than regular calls owing to their infrequency compared to pre-cell phone total phone usage, and the need to maintain the entire network off the profits.
A company whose revenues are below it's cost of operation goes out of business. A division that does the same thing costs its parent company money, and obviously cannot be spun off into a separate company.
A company that uses toxic materials to increase its profits over safety concerns is immoral. A company that decides to get out of an area for which there are not enough customers to sustain it? That's just good business, and that's good for everybody all around. It's how the economy relaxes toward its most efficient configuration. It's also how evolution works, but slashdot is full of anti-science fundies, so I can understand why such cynicism would appear here.
The brilliance of the enviro-collectivists is that they can't possibly get *all* of their measures approved, but they can probably get some of them. So, in 50 years, or 100 (though few around now will be around in 100..) when things are not nearly as dire as the scaremongering predictions deemed, they can point to the staggering array of freedom-reducing half-measures as the only reason it wasn't much, much worse, and so we should implement new, stronger measures, shouldn't we?
Obviously, you're not the type to get fussy about cables strewn all over your desk. Also, you probably don't switch mouse side frequently for variety, or you would see that the idea of a wireless keyboard is a good one: You can type on top of the desk, on your lap, under the desk, switch mouse side frequently, and move the keyboard out of the way for when you need the desk for something to do with actual paper.
You can do all of those things with a wired keyboard, but you've got to deal with twisting up the cable or your mouse will be useless. And depending on how you run the cable, you can't do all of those things at the same time. If you're fussy about the cable, you won't do those things very often at all, since anywhere but the default position tends to look messy.
So how's that repetitive stress injury workin' out for you?
But, call me when the chimps design and conduct the experiment.
That was the publicly funded project. And they would've taken even longer if the privately funded Celera hadn't gotten involved by threatening to finish a lot faster and less expensively.
I imagine that if it were possible, the reintroduction effort wouldn't be a one-shot all-or-nothing thing like you propose. Step one would be characterizing a complete set of DNA (non-nuclear DNA), to get an idea of what the cells of the final product would look like. Step two would be identification of genes which are present in existing animals, and a database search for a few candidate species similar enough to transform into the interesting species. Then there are a continuum of steps over several generations as you replace/add a little bit of the dino-dna to the candidate species until you end up with something that's close enough to implant the "pure" cells.
But, you're right, that every one of those steps is incredibly unlikely and currently impossible. And you'd have to find and reproduce all the symbiotic organisms as well, or at least find compatible modern analogues. I don't think anyone's worried about Jurassic Park, though. Jurassic Burger on the other hand sounds especially intriguing.
Oh, geez, not this meme again. The last time it was in vogue resulted in like 70 million deaths.
It's not you. They appear to have decided that yellow on beige is a good combo for headline text. For good measure, at the bottom of the page, there are some nice big blue arrows for advancing to some kind of following page or something. But they appear to have been lifted from a website with a white background.
I always wondered why the DVD format isn't just a lossy compressed giant 3D matrix of RGB triplets. Motion would correspond to a volume in 3-space, and you could get whatever framerate you wanted just by slicing the rectangular tube to arbitrarily thin slices.
The trick is to define your compression algorithm so that frames don't just fade into each other, but objects define regions. Like the pimentos in an olive loaf.
No, it'd make sense for them to recommend multicast as a distribution method. If you actually own the infrastructure, there's nothing bittorrent can do that multicast can't do better.
I sincerely doubt that you can buy Zunes through the Apple site. Obviously there, the Zune's numbers will look poor. Similarly at Microsoft's site, Zune sales outstrip iPod sales by a factor of billion to zero.
Only if you've never had an iPod and therefore avoided the iTunes Music Store. The Zune does not, afaik, play apple-drm'd music. If you're replacing an iPod, and you did use the music store, then the Zune is not as useful to you. Though I'm not sure this is actually an argument in favor of purchasing an additional iPod...
Plugging into google, 3lbs is about 40 cubic feet of air (at STP), which is ~half of a typical recreational SCUBA bottle. An out-of-shape open circuit diver can go through that much air in about 40 minutes at the surface.
There's enough oxygen present for maybe 3x that time. So depending on how they're replenishing gases, they're losing between 40 minutes and 2 hours of breathing gas a day, and depleting their diluent supply.
I wouldn't expect a few days of a leak like that to cause a pressure drop. Once the diluent (and/or stored oxygen) is depleted, then I'd expect to see the slow pressure drop.
Sigh.
The phrase isn't misused. In the absence of the rhetorical term called "begging the question," the words in the phrase "begs the question" are, in fact, equivalent to "raises [or asks for] the question."
It really has dual meaning: the meaning of the words themselves and the historical usage of the phrase in rhetorical circles.
Consider also, the phrase, "You're a dick." It could mean that the speaker is implying you're a member of the fraternity of people named, "Richard." It could also be a slang figure of speech calling you out as a pedantic jackass who wants to pretend s/he's superior to people by declaring one common use of a phrase as inferior to another common use of that phrase.
If you want a decent glass of soda, why would you buy it in a restaurant that serves drinks?
Sometimes, you just want something that mostly resembles what you're really interested in, and has other advantages, like is available in the place you are now, rather than someplace else.
That said, I don't drink McDonald's coffee, but I can't imagine it being substantially worse than Starbucks' fare, and that place bases it's entire business on bad coffee.
But what about C8H18?
And that famous video of someone dropping a lit cigarette into a puddle of gasoline?